By Lamplight
by Shun Ren Dan
Summary: Roxas was sure that she was either an axe murderer or the prettiest mugger he'd ever met in a back alley, but that didn't do much to dissuade him from getting to know her.


The music inside was still winding down when Roxas finally stepped into the cold, dark of the alley. Guitarists and bassists unwound inside, playing melancholy tunes while the crowd filtered out of the main entrance. Roxas could hear them mumbling to themselves about their favorite performers and the night's more spectacular bombs. He wasn't sure exactly where he fit along that list, but as Axel patted him on the back, he wasn't sure he cared. He'd rocked his heart out. What they thought didn't matter.

"Good job, buddy," Axel said, pulling an old, metal lighter out of his pocket while Roxas fiddled with the drumsticks in his left hand.

Dressed in the usual, minus his nearly trademark jacket, Roxas balked in the cold. He shouldn't have worn a sleeveless shirt. Axel, by comparison, was a lot better dressed. He wore the thick black coat he always wore, overlaid against a pair of khakis and black leather boots that helped him look the part of a rockstar.

As if he needed it.

The older man's wild, red hair marked him as something unique. People saw him coming from a mile away, and they could pick him out in a crowd without much trouble. It might've been a little harder if he weren't over six feet tall, but even still, Axel was hard to miss. Roxas, by comparison, was a bit harder to notice.

It was strange to be the face of a band when everyone knew the guitarist better. Roxas felt no jealousy over it… but it was a strange to him that everyone saw Axel as some sort of rock god and not as the guy that stubbed his toe six times before he got out of bed in the morning.

"You too," he muttered, watching as the redhead pulled a pair of cigarettes out of his pocket.

The second one wasn't for him.

He didn't smoke. Hated the taste, the smell. Loathed the idea of getting hooked on something so expensive. Axel seemed to notice his apprehension and shook his head.

"No, don't worry, I'm not gonna blow this in your face. Once Demyx finds us, we're gonna go find Saix, and…"

"Saix hates him," Roxas interjected.

"I mean, yeah, but Saix hates everybody," Axel replied. "He hates you too."

"Yeah, well, he's an asshole."

Axel laughed at that, unable to help himself.

"I mean, he knows you're talented," he relented. "He's just not a people person."

Roxas laughed next, totally caught off guard by Axel's defense. He wasn't wrong, but it was such an understatement that it should've been criminal. Then again, he knew that Axel and Saix had been friends since they were kids. He was pretty sure that something else was going on there, too, but he wasn't gonna comment on it. All he knew was that Axel cared a lot about his friend, and that he was more than willing to go to bat for him… not that Saix ever needed defending from anybody else.

"Yeah, yeah, not a people person. Are you gonna take my drums back for me? You'll be here later than I will."

Axel shrugged, toying with the latch on his zippo.

"I'll have Demyx do it. We're playing here tomorrow night too, so the least he can do is stuff 'em away in his trunk for the night."

The two made small talk until Demyx came out a few minutes later, followed by a handful of bedraggled looking groupies that were still actively harassing him when he pulled Axel away from Roxas and scooted down the alley toward the bar on the street corner. Roxas gave him a friendly enough wave and the Melodious Nocturne himself shot one back despite the obvious sea of distractions he was being forced to wade through.

Demyx was pretty popular. At least, in their scene. Most of the fans that enjoyed Roxas and Axel's set were more there for the sitarist that headlined most of their shows. It was cool of him to invite the two of them to everything he did, and Roxas was pretty sure that he'd quietly stuck his neck out to get them on the ticket a number of times. That night's show was really only a local place, tucked away in the back alleys of the city, but that hardly mattered.

He knew that they wouldn't have been there without the mulleted sitarist and his strange charisma.

Roxas pulled his cellphone out of his pocket at least ten times in the three minutes that followed, anxiously checking to see whether or not Xion was on her way. The two of them shared a car, and on nights she needed it, he usually let her have it. She was a perfect roommate otherwise, and it was difficult to tell her no when she put on the puppy dog eyes and really let him have it. The only problem was that she was almost always running a bit late.

If the show ended at eleven, he could count on her being there a little after midnight.

He was still staring down at the brightly lit screen in his hand when a blonde stranger walked out to stand alongside him, her instrument in its case over her shoulder. It looked suspiciously like a violin. She wore a short, white dress, maybe a little too formal for the venue, and didn't seem to immediately notice him. Which was good, because if she'd looked a little to her left, she would've seen Roxas staring (not quite slack jawed) as if she'd just fallen out of the sky.

Inside, the music was mostly gone, replaced by the fumbling murmur of a dozen different people chattering about the cleanup that was to follow.

Roxas tore his eyes away and glanced back down at his phone as she moved to join him in his silent vigil. Her gaze lingered on the street for a moment, and then landed on the side of his face. She didn't say anything for a second, perhaps contemplating what to say or wondering if he'd been staring or preparing to murder him with the case on her shoulder.

"Are you waiting for a ride, too?"

"Yeah," Roxas said.

"Are they late?"

"Yeah."

The stranger nodded, knowingly. "Mine too."

Roxas stuffed his phone in his pocket. It was hard for him to find something to say. He was pretty sure he'd never seen her around before, and if he had, he didn't remember her. Somehow, though, he was certain that he'd remember her if he'd seen her before.

"If you're looking for Demyx, he went down the street," he choked out. Demyx might've been a bit more entertaining than their back alley conversation. "So, if you're an axe murderer or a really pretty mugger, just… you know, you could get him instead."

She laughed at his joke and he was _certain_ that his face turned a little red.

"I'm not a mugger," she said. "And I don't think I could fit an axe in my case."

"Yeah. I guess I'm more likely to be a murderer than you anyway," he admitted, lifting the drumsticks in his hand up so that she could see them in the dim light of the alley. "I could poke your eyes out with these or something."

"I'd ask that you don't, if I thought that would stop you."

He snorted. Couldn't help it. She said it so politely and earnestly that he was only half sure she was kidding, but that made it funnier somehow. As if to oblige her, Roxas stuffed his drumsticks in his back pocket, making a good show of it.

"Now that the murder weapons are all gone," she began, extending a hand. "I'm Naminé. It's nice to meet you."

Roxas shook it, a bit gentler than he usually would have, and nodded in reply.

"Roxas. Nice to meet you too."

Something in the way she smiled told him that she already knew his name somehow. He'd never felt so painfully awkward in his life; he was sure that literally everything he said to her sounded dumb, or crazy, or like the thing a real back alley mugger might say before mugging a person, but she seemed totally untouched by all of it. It was sort of impressive, really.

"You played well tonight," she said.

"Me?"

"Yes, you."

"No way you heard me, then. Those acoustics sucked. And I'm pretty sure I messed up the lyrics on the third song. Axel said I skipped, like, a whole verse."

She laughed again. Roxas's shoulders relaxed and he only realized in that moment that they'd been tense to begin with. Something about hearing her at ease put him at ease too. What reason did he have to be nervous?

"I didn't say you were the best," she decided, agreeing with him. "But you still played well. I liked your performance, anyway."

Roxas eyed her violin case. It wasn't the instrument he expected to see at the Hall of Empty Melodies. It was such an ironically named dive that no actual musician would ever have dared step foot in it.

"Did you play? I don't think I saw you go up there."

"No, I was thinking about it, but I decided against it."

He wondered, briefly, who she was that she could decide to go up on stage on a whim. It was possible that she knew someone at the venue, but even then… it was an interesting question, but not one that he felt the need to explore. All he needed to know was that she was the prettiest girl he'd ever met in a back alley.

The invitation that came next was so sudden that he nearly choked on air.

"Would you like to go get something to eat?"

"It's midnight," he answered.

"I know."

Roxas inhaled slowly, thinking about where they would even go. The city at night was not a particularly nice place, but it was a beautiful one, and he had to admit that the idea of grabbing a bite sounded good.

"Yeah," he finally said. "Let's go. This alley sucks anyway."

As it turned out, Naminé didn't know a single place to eat nearby. Not a single restaurant or place with good bar food, not a single street name or intersection. That didn't turn out to be all that big a problem, however, since he got to know her while they explored the winding streets around them. An hour later, the two found themselves stuffed into a corner booth at a Wafflestop, sharing the same side of it while Naminé pointed at and inquired about various menu items that could not possibly have been real food.

"Stuffed hashbrowns," she decided, "are not real food."

"Just because eating it'll give you a heart attack doesn't make it not real food."

"If it kills you, is it really edible?"

"That's the best part about it. Look," he insisted, pointing to the little description of its menu entry. "There's so much good stuff in there. Eggs. Sausage. Real potatoes, maybe. Tons of cheese."

"Real potatoes, maybe."

"You can't prove they're not real until you try 'em."

Naminé looked a little incredulous at that, but didn't question the infinite wisdom of Roxas's breakfast food knowledge. Instead, she pointed to a burger on the menu's second page.

"The Hashburger," she recited, dutiful to the description, "is a heart stopping combination of our super stuffed hashbrowns and a double cheeseburger."

Roxas stared down at it for a second.

"That would kill a person," she said. "It's not food."

"Some things are worth dying for. Maybe not, like, that in particular, but other things."

"Stuffed hashbrown things, I'm guessing."

Within minutes, the two of them were staring a plate of Wafflestop's patented stuffed hashbrowns. It was a simple enough order: a mountain of gravy, shredded potatoes, and cheese laid overtop a bedrock of sausage, biscuits, and scrambled eggs. Naminé regarded it a little carefully, but Roxas held no such reservations, proudly pointing to what he figured was the pinnacle achievement of mankind's progress through the years with his knife.

He speared a forkful of it and held it out so that Naminé could examine the little cross section he'd created.

"That's just gravy and potatoes," she concluded. "Ambiguously real potatoes."

"The mystery is the fun part."

She took the fork from him, grateful that he hadn't bit off of it yet, and stuffed the bite into her mouth with just a little bit of reserve. Roxas took the fact that she didn't die to be a good sign, nodding knowingly as she chewed and passed the fork back to him. After a second, she took another bite, this time with her own fork.

Relishing in sweet victory, Roxas dug in himself, eager to get some food in him. He hadn't eaten since lunch and the cold outside only sharpened the need for something warm. The hot food before them helped to assuage that desire, and the company hardly hurt things any.

"So," he interjected upon the silence. "Don't take this the wrong way. Do you come to the city often?"

"No," she admitted. "I just come to play sometimes."

"At the place we just were?"

"No."

Roxas nodded. That made enough sense. She didn't seem the type to hang around the Hall of Empty Melodies.

"Where, then?"

Naminé swallowed back a half-mouthful of food and gestured, with her fork, toward the city's center.

"The concert hall uptown. It's nice, but… the people are a bit stuffy."

Suddenly, the fact that she was carrying a violin made a lot more sense. It was no wonder she decided not to play at a rock venue. What didn't make sense was why she'd come in the first place.

"So, why did you come out tonight? Didn't you say you were gonna play?"

That question made her think a little, but he could tell by the look on her face that she'd already given it a good bit of thought. She put her fork down and mulled over her answer in silence, searching for the right words that would explain to him her reasoning.

"It's important," she said, still working through it aloud, "that you be able to translate one thing into another. Knowing how to write poetry can help you learn to write lyrics. Knowing how a good frontman plays the crowd can show you how to play one yourself, if you look at the right things and pick up on the right cues. Not everything transfers over, but if you pay attention, you'll almost always learn something."

Roxas looked a little stunned by the thoughtfulness of her response. She took his pause to mean he wanted more.

"I knew I wasn't going to play anything, if I'm being honest. Something tells me that the crowd wouldn't have appreciated my music anyway... but I liked everyone else's well enough."

"Yeah," Roxas relented. "It's hard to imagine Axel jamming out to a violin solo."

"Axel. Is he the boy you played with?"

"Mhm. He's pretty good. A little crazy sometimes, but…"

As if on cue, the bell over the door sang, and Axel came sauntering in. Demyx was practically attached to his hip. Both were obviously drunk, occupied by a sing-song sort of happiness that neither of them could hide. Roxas was half-tempted to tell Naminé to duck down behind their little mountain of food when Axel caught sight of him. Instead, he just held up his hand, mortified by the fact that they were there at all.

"Roxas!"

Demyx turned, slinging an arm over Axel's shoulder and waving happily toward them.

"Ahhh! It's Roxas! Roxas, how are ya?"

The two of them sauntered over and plopped down in the seat opposite Roxas and Naminé, obviously unimpeded by the fact that they'd been having a perfectly fine time on their own. Axel nabbed Roxas's fork and immediately took a big bite out of the hashbrowns on the table, offering one to Demyx a second later.

"Long time no see, long time no see," Axel said, despite having seen him an hour ago. "How's the date going?"

"It's not a…"

"She's pretty," Demyx interjected. Suspicious, he pointed Roxas's fork at Naminé. "And familiar. Haven't I seen you somewhere?"

Naminé smiled a lot more graciously than Roxas would have.

"It's possible. I'm sure we've seen each other around somewhere. You play a lot of bigger shows, don't you?"

"I do, I do, I'm super talented," Demyx admitted. Axel punched him in the shoulder.

"This guy couldn't be more humble if he tried."

It was a miracle that Roxas didn't die from embarrassment right then and there. Somehow, though, he persisted, living through the conversation that followed. Apparently, Naminé did know Demyx — he'd met her once a few months ago, caught in the middle of negotiating some sort of payment with the fellow who owned the concert hall. Apparently, the guy hadn't met one of his demands (that all the M&Ms in his ready room be blue). Unable to abide this grave sin, Demyx had come by the next evening in order to give him hell.

Well, as much hell as Demyx could give anybody. According to Naminé's testimony, the mulleted sitarist had been on the verge of tears when she'd walked in. Roxas believed that well enough, but Demyx insisted that the guy had been inches from caving and ready to offer him another night at a discounted fee.

With four people picking at it, they managed to get through Roxas and Naminé's order in no time at all, leading to Demyx ordering the table a round of pancakes that neither Roxas nor Naminé touched. Axel dug in happily, devouring Roxas's and passing Demyx the plate that belonged to Naminé when he noticed she wasn't that hungry.

While Demyx ranted on and on about some show he'd played a state over, Roxas found himself sneaking peeks over at Naminé, who looked earnestly interested. The fact that she didn't run away screaming from his friends and their antics was a good sign. At least, he thought so. It meant she might've been a little crazy, but so was he and so were they. Somehow, though, he got the impression that it wasn't insanity that kept her with them. It seemed more like an honest curiosity, a willingness to expand her horizons.

He thought back to her words from earlier, the reason she'd come to the Hall of Empty Melodies in the first place. What was it that she figured she could learn from Demyx? From Axel?

From him?

It wasn't long before the four of them were back out on the street, with Axel and Demyx bickering about how late it was and how the hell they were going to get home. Axel could drive, he insisted, if he had "like a little longer to sober up." Roxas was making fun of him before he could stop himself.

"I have no idea how you got so drunk in, like, an hour to begin with. You lightweight."

"I'm not a lightweight," Axel shot back. "I'm just good at what I do. Besides, it's been, like, forever since I had anything."

"Right, we get it, you're good at what you do..." Demyx said, patting the redhead on the shoulder. "I've got a good way to check ya out. A field sobriety test. Between the two of us, who's the cool one?"

"...What? Obviously, me."

Demyx turned to Roxas and Naminé, concern playing across his face.

"Oh, man. Maybe he's still skunked after all. I mean, I'm the handsome one, the smart one, the funny one, and the cute one. Plus, I'm the one with the car, so..."

Nonplussed, Axel crossed his arms over his chest and took off down the sidewalk, playfully turning his nose up at the three of them. He made a big show of every step. "Man, what a lack of respect. Maybe I'll just walk home on my own. Since, unlike this car-bound peasant, I actually live here."

"Ah, wait, no, hang on! Don't leave me!"

Demyx patted Roxas on the head and ruffled his feathery hair, taking off after Axel a second later. He shot a pair of finger guns off into the air like six shooters as he disappeared around the corner after his friend, offering Roxas a parting wink as he vanished.

"Be good, you two! Get home safe!"

Standing beneath the glow of a streetlamp, Roxas let the silence settle in, pleased that he no longer had to worry about his friends making him look dumb or stupid or flawed or any of the things that he secretly worried he was when they weren't around. Naminé stood beside him, giggling quietly to herself. Her laughter died down after a moment, but the grin that spread across her face stayed there. Painted like an angel in the pale glow put off by the streetlight, she turned to Roxas.

"Your friends are interesting," she decided. "Technically, I'm already friends with Demyx. But, Axel seems nice too. Maybe a little too outgoing. But nice."

"Haven't you only met Demyx, like, one time?"

"That doesn't mean we can't be friends," she reminded him. "He's really a lot like a puppy, you know."

He figured that was true enough.

"I wish we could get him a leash sometimes."

She laughed at that, and then turned her gaze back to the street. Cars, like black beetles, passed by. Each one brought with it a stiff gust of wind, pushing Naminé closer to him until his hand found her waist and she was leaning up against him with a proximity that made his heart beat fast. Her hair smelled just a little like strawberries and despite the cold air she was mercifully warm. Her head on his shoulder, she looked up at him in the lamplight.

It took a lot not to lean down and kiss the strange, otherworldly girl attached to him. His eyes lingered on her lips, traveled up to the curvature of her subtle nose, and then met her gaze. He wondered if she could possibly have been thinking the same thing.

"I wonder," she began, her voice soft and low, "what happened to that ride of yours."

Roxas blinked.

"Huh?"

Then he remembered.

Naminé stepped away from him, politely allowing him to reach into his pocket and check his phone. There were about forty text messages waiting for him, asking where he was. There were a few about how she'd fallen asleep and that she'd be on her way soon. A third of them were just fifty question marks, and others were gifs of a cartoon bear violently mauling a rabbit. One was from Axel, and it was just a picture of him giving a thumbs up while Demyx chased after him in the background. Roxas's face went a little white as he reluctantly sent Xion a reply, letting her know that he was a few blocks away and that she could come get him whenever.

He couldn't believe he'd lost track of time so quickly. It was like she'd taken him on a trip through time. Apparently, they'd been at the Wafflestop for hours. Suddenly, it made a lot more sense that Axel and Demyx had been so hungry.

"She's on her way," Roxas announced, looking back up to Naminé.

She stared back at him, quiet.

"What about yours?"

"He's waiting nearby," she said. It was only then that Roxas noticed her phone, strapped into a little pocket on the front of her case. "I figured we'd be a while, so I told him where we'd be eating."

There was another silence. He wasn't sure what to say. Their adventure, however brief, had been an interesting one. Honestly, despite the fact that they'd just met, it was easy for him to tell that he liked her a lot more than he should've. She was gentle and quiet, with a brave sort of spirit about her that he couldn't put words to. She didn't hate his friends and she apparently played the violin. The rest was a series of blank points that he felt compelled to fill in.

"Can I see your phone?"

He blinked, unsure for a second if he'd heard her right. He passed it dutifully to her a second later. Her lithe fingers moved carefully over the screen, navigating their way to the contacts section and making an entry for herself. Once she was done, she handed it back to him.

"There."

A long, black car pulled up to the curb before Roxas could say much more. A burly looking man with brown hair and a driver's cap stepped out, silently, to take her case and deposit it into the trunk. A moment later, he opened the door for her, gesturing for her to step inside the car's roomy interior and disappear into the night. Instead, she stood stock still for a moment, transfixed by some nebulous something that must've been on her mind. Her hand stretched behind her back, taking hold of her arm while she peered up at him.

"Roxas," she spoke and he went quiet, the golden hair that framed her cherubic face lit up by lamplight. "It was nice to meet you."

It felt colder when she left him there, standing on the corner. He watched her car until it turned around the corner, its taillights fading away like two fireflies dancing off into the black.


End file.
